Teens are rewriting what is possible in the world of competitive Tetris
polygon.com
polygon.com
Example of someone getting sub 20 seconds with this method: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TGW4j7LRBJk
Sure you could make a no hypertapping or rolling category for Tetris. Calling better techniques a glitch seems wrong, though speed runners often disagree on what exactly constitutes a "glitch" anyway.
We're not created equal, welcome to literally every sport EVER.
I wouldn't have banned it, but I would understand if they decided to have separate categories for hypertapping and "regular" play. Rolling seems to have fixed the problem.
Generally speaking regulated sports tend to draw lines here too, though obviously some draw them fairly far into the injury territory. Most of those are explicitly fighting sports though.
OTOH, almost every sport hurts at pro level, and I think it's safe to say that all pro sports are unhealthy, except a few of them. E.g. Federer has serious issues with his knees, has had more injuries than an average 60 year old man.
The most obvious is really that while the case for rules against performance enhancing drugs is usually that they just give an unfair advantage, if you look at what's actually banned and what's not, and how natural advantages are treated, it seems pretty clear that most banned substances are also the most harmful, while others skate under regulation. Esports hasn't even reckoned with this yet afaik, even at pro levels. We'll see where we're at in 10-20 years as it mainstreams.
As you point out in the other branch, that's kind of motivated largely by PR concerns. People are mostly ok with basically anyone ruining their body slowly for a job (unless it's their own), but they balk at rapid injury. My point is really just that hypertapping potentially gets very close to this line, and that's a big part of why there was a drive to find a replacement technique or even ban it from competitive use.
Anyways, there's a lot more research into how to do high APMs with a keyboard and mouse ergonomically than there is with an NES controller, which also has a hard and shallow throw compared to either of those and a very unergonomic shape to begin with. There's a lot of reasons they aren't obviously comparable to each other when talking about the RSIs they can cause.
If users want to forgo that mechanism why shouldn't they be allowed? If I'm in a typing competition and am typing a word with a repeated letter such as the two l's in "all", you would never expect me to have to press the l key and wait for the computer to automatically type a second l until I released. You'd expect me to just press the l key twice because it's faster and that wouldn't be considered a "hack". Why would you expect anything different for Tetris players?
As for Mario, it's just a slightly more realistic game in terms of you controlling a set of pixels that represent a person instead of blocks. Mario doesn't move from one column to the next, he smoothly travels through all the pixels between columns because people in the real world move smoothly. Tetris blocks aren't real world objects though so they can move one column at a time. If it only takes one frame for a block to move one column, why shouldn't I be able to move the block one column every frame?
Also, in the official game, if you use DAS you move at 10Hz (moving once every 6 frames). It looks like top players can tap at around 20Hz. That's only 2x faster.
For example, in Super Mario Brothers non-TAS runs, the rules are based around the controller and execution environment. You are not allowed to modify the controller or tilt the cartridge, but that's it.
Having the rules only limit the tools required, just like in sports, is quite elegant. If somebody figured a way to play faster with their teeth, it would be allowed, and rolling the controller is just something like that.
On the other hand, people found out that you can perform certain feats in SMB by pressing the left and right button at the same time. This is considered impossible with the standard D-Pad (without e.g. cutting it in the middle), so that is banned. At least until somebody figures out a way how to do it with the standard D-Pad.
And while it's not true for most 2d platformers of smb's era, performing repetative button actions to move faster than the standard acceleration curve allows became very possible in 16bit games and a later, and you'll see those used in speedruns all the time. Usually a repeated dash, but sometimes weird stuff like running backwards, jumping in certain ways (smb actually has one of these), or rhythmically pumping the shoulder buttons.
Only on QWERTY. On Dvorak there's a very rigid mapping and it very evenly uses all the fingers.
Personally, the ability to distribute the load more is why I prefer the number row over a number pad when typing numbers; though Dvorak helps there by putting the punctuation closer to the number row.
And on my ergonomic keyboard I have the numbers on the home row in the number layer, rather than in a numpad layout.
This has to be a function of what is being typed, not the keyboard it's being typed on. I am assuming you mean English evenly uses all the fingers? Something like Polish, or Welsh, I'd expect to not be very "even" on a Dvorak keyboard.
Also - as someone who has learned both - I adamantly believe Dvorak is inferior to Colemak in almost every single way. From difficulty learning the layout to the ergonomics once learned to having to rebind or relearn hotkeys - especially common ones like cut/copy/paste. I only wish I had discovered Colemak prior to wasting time learning Dvorak all those many years ago.
Colemak heatmap: https://zhangshenjia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/8.jpg
Qwerty & Dvorak heatmap: https://whyfiles.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/dvorak3.jpg
(And as Bradwood pointed out in the response below - definitely biased towards typing English and not other languages. So people who primarily type a language that is not English may have drastically different experiences.)
I never liked the idea of colemak being intentionally similar to qwerty and changing up fewer keys than dvorak. I thought this idea was limiting and gave people the easy way out. Workman applies a similar idea, which again annoyed me at first, but I'm pretty used to it now. I'd say it makes it more confusing to type qwerty on another keyboard as some keys are the same and muscle memory can get mixed up between the two. I don't type qwerty much at all, so maybe this would improve over time. With dvorak I think only a and m were the same for the letters, so it felt more like hitting a distinct switch.
Workman also avoids the issue in colemak that colemak mod-dh had to fix from what I understand. Of course these layouts are not all the same age, so one might learn their layout and become loyal to it before a better one is invented. Dvorak is quite old now, and colemak is at least older than workman.
I no longer remember dvorak at all. I think I used it for 18-24 months or so. I'll probably remember qwerty forever since I grew up on it, and I use workman daily so it's safe for now. I have used workman for at least a year and a half, maybe two and a half now.
Instantly got addicted, and I was amazed to see how good everyone is. 14 year old me with my gameboy would have been stunned at how fast and crazy modern Tetris is. And multi-national! Love it, but had to give it up after a few months because it seemed like it would/or was causing my longstanding RSI to come back.
These days I just load up the official site's web version [0] but lately they've crammed more and more ads onto the page and Ublock Origin can't keep up. Sometimes the tab totally freezes. Makes it difficult to enjoy.
After that it's probably classic Game Boy Tetris.
I have a keychain toy I got as a child that has a cheap LCD recreation.
<strike>clearly the best option is bastet on linux</strike>
For modern Tetris, Tetr.io or jstris.
The latest I’m aware of is [0].
It's actually not that difficult --- it's probably one of the most cloned/ported puzzle games, but almost always called something other than Tetris because their lawyers really don't want you using that name. "Russia Block" is/was a relatively common synonym.
The game mechanics are actually quite complex when you include all of the details. Sure, you might say those details are superfluous, but there’s a reason many people prefer classic Tetris over more recent versions. Nintendo’s original mechanics are much more challenging but also very satisfying to play with.
https://www.firstpersontetris.com/
It's fun to give someone without telling them the whole view rotates whenever you rotate the piece because it's extremely disorienting if you're not used to it, but after a bit of practice it becomes easy
For single player https://jstris.jezevec10.com/ or https://simon.lc/tetr.js/ are the best.
On a semi-related note, this article stirred some nostalgia for a related game, "Welltris" (sort of a 3-d version of Tetris) that was popular among the MS-DOS crowd in the late 80s/early 90s.
He was the one in our household and social circle to figure out that the counter on the PC version of Tetris was only 16 bits. You maxed out at 65k, not 1 million.
He hit that not by maxing out the score before level 29, but by just learning to push through level 30. He would sit in that office for hours playing a single game, chair pushed back, elbows on knees, looking like a baseball player waiting to clear the bench.
These days I am more impressed with people hitting 60% lightning gun in Quake or executing crazy hard army manuevers in StarCraft.
Still though, Tetris is an early love of mine
31 years later the world figures out that head to head tetris is pretty cool.
The only thing positive I see is that they actually have a closed circle from different nations, so he made some "online friends" there.
Neither were a replacement for the other.
It's been the subject of study but it's impossible to truly reject the hypothesis due to the ubiquity of the effect - there's no control group. Obviously correlation is not causation, but I think the severity of the effects warrant further thought and investigation.
Online friends were very important to me growing up, and still are today.
I answered, but to further clarify: online friendships are not sufficient. No one said they don't have their place, either.
It's the same excitement as speedrunning if that helps you get it. Having a community where you are all trying to get better at something while having fun doing so.
It shouldn't replace irl friends, but there are much worse online friends to have than Classic Tetris players.
That being said, I’ve followed the scene for 6 years and always found it very interesting to watch.
Pot and TV can be fun too, and is mostly indistinguishable from what most Suburbanites do in their late twenties anyway. In my view you want to teach your kids how to assess if something has become a destructive obsession.
Likewise, if the kid is objectively good and entertaining, there is a market for it just like any other
I was a pretty high-level Scrabble player, devoting a handful of years of my life to it, and it’s one of the biggest regrets I have. Total waste of time and only a attempt to ignore the other things I hated about my life.
A more appropriate analogy for me would actually be frontend development in my early twnties. I was genuinely interested in the technical bits, independent of the fact that I hated various aspects of my life, but I escaped into it and later realized that it wasn't worth it because I was fired anyway. But I don't regret building up skills in that.
Point is, your kid finds something they're good at, maybe you cultivate it rather than try and repress it. Maybe they get too obsessed because they feel repressed by their parents in other areas, that's a thing. But you teach them appropriate life balance skills and hopefully they have the framework to step back when it's time.
Good for him for finding the experience that he enjoys when he's young.
Can hardly blame your son for not taking something seriously which is mostly taken seriously because everybody thinks that everybody else takes it seriously and you can't just opt out of impressing others because it will limit what you can do and earn in the future. College itself is just a glorified game but a far more boring and unfair one than Tetris.
Here are some ways it helped me kickstart my self taught software engineering carreer:
- I learned how to enter the zone almost on command. I recognized my triggers and exploited them.
- I learned how to moderate a community. Now I see the fruits of that because somehow in the two companies I've worked at I've been seen as a leader even when I was a junior developer.
- I learned that learning stuff wasn't really that hard. It mostly requires dedication. I memorized speedrunning routes from google doc files for several games and it translates well into the experience I've had of reading documentation to learn a tool.
- I perfected my English. As a non-native speaker, practicing English with natives gave me the tools to now work for companies abroad that are astronomically better than local ones in every conceivable way.
I'm sure there are other benefits as well. There are also some risks such as social isolation, but that really depends on the player's surroundings more than anything.
nullpomino 40line clears look insane: